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If you’re looking to build an online community or following, it can be really easy to fall into the third-party trap. With so many high-quality and popular services, taking advantage of their offerings seems like a quick and cheap way to get up and running. Set up a community on Ning, email services on Aweber or MailChimp, broadcasting on Twitter, a fan club on Facebook, and a blog at WordPress.com or Blogger. You’ve got all the bases of an online presence covered in a single afternoon without hiring a designer or developer and with minimal investment of your time and energy.
But it could all be dangerous trap.
To be clear, I’m not saying to avoid these third-party services all together. Just be careful about which ones you choose and how you use them. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:
Own Something Yourself
Having an online presence spread out over several sites and services is great – you’re in more places and you’re meeting your audience where they are. But make sure you own a home base – even if it’s just simple site with 1 or 2 pages. Have a domain name that’s a short and as easy to remember (and spell) as possible. That way, no matter what’s going on with the online services that you’re relying on, you’ve got a constant, permanent home.
Know Who Owns Your Content and Contacts
I know, I know – the terms of service pages on these sites are long and boring legalese. But read them carefully before you trust too much of your data and community to them. Do you maintain control over your own content? Can the site or service you’re posting to use your content for their own purposes? Do you have control over how the content is displayed and to whom?
If you’re using a service to build a community or contact list, understand if those contacts are yours, or if they are customers of the service you’re using.
Make Sure Your Content is Portable
If a year or two down the road you’re not happy with the service you’re receiving or things change, how easily can you take your content with you to a new service? Remember that everything you post to a third-party site or service resides on their servers, not your own. If you decide to set up a blog of your own or move your email service to a new provider, make sure you can easily export your contacts and posts to move to a new server.
Have a Backup Plan
Free online services like Facebook and Twitter have no contractual obligation to continue operating. They could be gone tomorrow without warning. Just ask the people who were relying on the Magnolia service that went belly up overnight and left them all without access unexpectedly. Make sure that you’re keeping your own copies of the content you post or use a regular backup service. SitePoint outlines methods for backing up your social media content in their article, “13 Tools to Back Up Your Social Media Content“.
In Conclusion
Using various social media sites and third party services can be a great way to get up and running quickly and at a reduced cost. It’s also a great way to meet your audience where they already are – on Facebook and Twitter, for example. Just be careful about which services you use, how you use them, and make sure that no matter what, through it all, there’s something that you own that’s uniquely yours and completely under your control.
